


And me your forest lass

by dwellingondreams



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Bandits & Outlaws, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Character Study, Chivalry, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, POV Female Character, POV Third Person, Pre-Canon, Present Tense, Rough Sex, The Kingsguard, The Kingswood, The Kingswood Brotherhood, Unhealthy Relationships, Year of the False Spring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:14:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28038270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dwellingondreams/pseuds/dwellingondreams
Summary: “My featherbed,” she sings out in tune to the burble of the stream, picking her way along the rotting tree trunk jutted across it, hearing the pleasant creak and groan of wood, muffled by the moss, “is deep and soft, and there-,” she loses her footing for an instant; her leather boots are worn soft as a kid, and while they’re as comfortable as they’ll ever be, it can lead a woman to slip, even one as light-footed as she.They don’t call her Fawn round these parts for nothing.(In which Wenda the White Fawn and the Smiling Knight pull a Bonnie & Clyde).
Relationships: Arthur Dayne & The Smiling Knight, Arthur Dayne & Wenda the White Fawn, Wenda the White Fawn/The Smiling Knight
Comments: 12
Kudos: 49





	And me your forest lass

“My featherbed,” she sings out in tune to the burble of the stream, picking her way along the rotting tree trunk jutted across it, hearing the pleasant creak and groan of wood, muffled by the moss, “is deep and soft, and there-,” she loses her footing for an instant; her leather boots are worn soft as a kid, and while they’re as comfortable as they’ll ever be, it can lead a woman to slip, even one as light-footed as she. 

They don’t call her Fawn round these parts for nothing. Certainly not just for her big eyes and ears and the speckle of dark freckles across her sun-tanned face. “And there I’ll lay you down,” she continues gamely, regaining herself. Beneath her, the contents of the wooden trunk Big Belly Ben kicked downhill in a rage a little while ago are carried by the waters. Clothes, not coin; expensive clothes, mark that, but too late now to have any hope of trading them for food and supplies. 

No, it’s late in the season now, they all swear it, the hardy, cunning winter is over, and the rot of spring set in. In the winter they were quick and furtive as foxes and hares, and ate well, sheltered in houses and inns and barns, never lacked for friends. 

Now it’s spring, or so they’re saying, save the Citadel, and the snows have melted away and there’s rain hung in the air, and the Kingswood does not shelter them beneath the frost, and the trees don’t bow to them, hung low with ice, as they ride by. 

And the smallfolk look to the sun, or the man they swear brings the morn with him, the tall, bright one who carries a magic sword. 

“Oh, I’ll dress you all in yel-low silk,” she says, plucking off a hanging branch and plucking up a sodden garment from the waters, “and on your head-,” she crosses to the other side, the dripping dress in hand, “a crown,” she finishes, wringing the gown out. 

“My,” says a twisty, crooked voice, filtered through the leafy branches. “I could have sworn that belonged to the Lady Jeyne.” 

The Lady Jeyne is currently bound hand and foot to a wooden post in the center of their makeshift camp, along with her old cow of a septa, who bleated loud enough that Ulmer came running and near put an arrow in that fool Midge Miller for trying to rape the girl. Course Midge swears he wasn’t, only wanted a look, or so they all swear. 

Toyne won’t hold for such a things, lest Wenda wouldn’t be here in the first place; she’s stupid as they come, she supposes, and near brave as that, but no woman is stupid or brave enough to bed down with rapers and think she’ll come out of it alright because she’s a fair shot with a bow and a fair hand with a dirk. 

“Oh, does it?” she calls out to the trunks, hanging the gown from a low branch; the yellow silk no longer shines, but it still radiates wealth and power, drawing all the light around it. 

“Is my brave ser here to restore her silks to her? Might be he’ll get a kiss for it, as Ulmer did from the Princess.”

Wenda was there for that, too, when Gerold Hightower was trying not to scream, clutching his wounded hand to his white-plate chest, trying to staunch the blood, and the Dornish princess was sat there in her wheelhouse, a hand on the door, stiff with fright but still calm enough to keep the other women with her from raising up a fuss. 

When Ulmer took his kiss from her she looked for an instant as if she might strike at him, but then just coolly turned her cheek, and held still as a marble statue of the Maiden when his lips brushed her olive skin. 

She looked at Wenda after that, the way one might look at a trick dog in a corner of the inn, as if to say, ‘And what might you be doing here, girl? Riding around with these ruffians? When my prince comes riding out, he’ll hang you with the rest, tricky bitch or not.’

Course, the prince ain’t riding out, is he? No, they leave that to the white pigs.

“A kiss from a swan would be sweet,” he says, “but I like something with more bite to it.”

She sees him then; he’s near reedy as a tree, and in his mottled grey and brown mail, could be one. Smiling. Always smiling. 

“Swans have teeth,” she clacks hers at him, crooked and yellowed in her mouth, though no more than anyone else’s. She runs her hand down the wet gown again. Last she wore a gown not half as fine, it was her wedding day. But that was then and this is now. 

“Aye,” he says, closer now, caging her so her back is to the dress, blowing in the wind like a curtain, like this was their bedchamber, and the burbling stream their music. “So do fawns.”

“Not for biting,” she blinks up at him innocently, and feels the wet fabric momentarily plaster against the back of her scalp when he kisses her, hard and quick, as is a man’s habit when he’s half-mad and half-hard. 

She gives a quick swipe at his cock through his breeches, but he heads her off, and picks her up, his gloved fingers hard and cruel under the muscle of her thighs.

Her back scrapes against the tree; for an instant the wind tosses the yellow silk between them, and all she can see is the shadow of his long face behind it; and then tears it away entirely, her prize flung back into the water. 

“Shall I fetch my lady’s garment?” he asks, cracked lips twitching.

“Yes,” she says, tightening herself against him, and pulling loose her belt. “Fetch my garment, my lord.”

It is a grand jape between them, that he has noble blood. 

Wenda could believe it because she could believe just about anything of him; that he was born a storm lord’s bastard, that he grew up in Flea Bottom and tore out a man’s throat with his teeth when he was ten, that he was raised in a septry and fled before he could take his vows, that he was a squire to his uncle, and made off with his horse, armor, and sword after he died in a tavern fight. 

That he has always been a knight, that he has never been a knight. That he is quite mad or perfectly sane, the sanest man she’s ever met. 

He pulls down her her lambskin leggings, and she feels goosebumps break out at the rush of cool air against her skin. 

“I liked your song,” he says, smiling against her ear, his breath hot and horrible against her ear. “Tell me the rest.”

“You don’t know it?” she snorts, as he unlaces himself, one-handed, the other still holding her up. “Take off your mail.”

She’s only seen him naked once; if he bathes, and he must, or she’d smell him from much further away, he must always do it by night, like when she saw him in a forest pool, coming out of the water, hair ratty and dark and lank against his shoulders, and the white raised scars of a scourging stark against the tanned skin of his back. 

He saw her then, and in the moonlight his eyes seemed more animal than man, and she could do nothing but turn and run back to camp, thinking he might kill her, to have seen him not the Knight but a mere man. He gave chase at first, then gave up, though he could have caught her and strangled her without a sound, or bashed her head in on a rock.

“No,” he rasps, to the question and the command. 

He’s stroking himself now; she shivers impatiently, and jerks her hips. “For you shall be my lady love,” she says, looking at his dark, bright eyes, like crawling beetles in his sunken skull, “and I shall be your lord-,” she reaches down, quick, to give him a squeeze, but he lets go of his cock and twists her wrist painfully until she grunts, then tears off his glove with his teeth, takes it up again, and fucks her. 

“And I shall be your lord,” she repeats through her teeth; he bites her neck, hard enough to draw blood, then licks it away with a quick slick of his tongue. 

A faint horn blows, in the distance. A warning. They should be on guard. 

If he hears, he gives no sign of it. 

She thinks she’ll get her tea tonight, from their woodswitch, unless she’s already run. They’ve been losing people by the day, these past three weeks, and there’s not much anyone can do to stop them from melting off into the trees, as much as Toyne huffs and puffs over it.

“Come on,” she snarls in his ear; impatient now. He hits the spot she was waiting for him to find, and she makes a choked little noise, like he’d grabbed her by the neck and squeezed. 

She feels him finish, but he still doesn’t pull out until he’s gone all the way soft again, and then she wants him out, shoving uselessly at his shoulders. He lets her sag down the trunk, her lambskin around her ankles, then hauls her up by the hand as she hobbles over to the stream, washes herself with a quick few scoops of cold water, and tugs them back up, legs strangely boneless for the next few moments as she straps back on her hip quiver. 

He’s finished lacing himself back up when the horn blows again, and gives the hilt of the sword at his back a mocking little tap. 

He’s a tall man but he always stands slightly hunched, though he’s not near old enough to bend like that yet. Might be his neck is too long for his body, like Oswyn’s. 

Might be he prefers it that way, thinks men will underestimate him for how he carries himself, all crooked and crossed, like a gnarled tree growing the wrong way. 

“I’ll always keep her warm and safe,” he mocks, “and guard her with my sword.”

“Fuck off,” she waves a hand at him, pulls a face.

He grins all the more, and crosses the trunk with two loping strides. 

Wenda follows, still humming under her breath, itching the bow secured to her back. 

If it’s who she thinks it is, if they’ve finally found them, all the better. 

She’s sick of darting from place to place, no longer promised sanctuary in any town or village, always trading off watches, never able to properly rest. No more long nights around the fire, no more carefree rides through the wood. Just scurrying about like rats in a branchy cage. 

She flexes her fingers, cracks her knuckles. She used to pick rats off one by one, perched in the loft of her family’s barn. They always got bold in the spring. And afterwards, she’d walk around, picking out her arrows. Once she skewered two on the same one. 

She pictures an arrow going through the Sword of the Morning’s gleaming skull, splitting him like a melon. He’d topple off his horse with his brains leaking out, and maybe the Knight would have a sword that didn’t look like an overgrown and rusted needle. He’s been saying for days now he’d a mind to take it off Dayne, after he kills him. She hopes it’s not quick; she’s a mind to watch from the safety of a tree. 

That’s most often where she is; Wenda is small and quick and light of foot, so she stays high and hidden, most fights. No sense in getting her head caved or her guts spilled out down on the ground. It’s always safer in the trees. Ulmer says they ought to call her Wenda the White Squirrel instead. 

As they break into the clearing she sees that the camp is in disorder; men are saddling their horses and strapping on their paltry armor, and the women and children are following the stream south, further into the wood. They used to have more running about, but since the Kingsguard and the goldcloaks came into the wood, many split off, no longer trusting the Brotherhood could keep them safe. 

Wenda doesn’t blame them. She knows what it’s like to haul a child on your hip, a pail of water on your head or shoulder, or sticks in a bundle on your back. That life is no longer hers, it died in a dark old barn, swaying and creaking on the end of a rope. 

Toyne is barking commands in the center of it all, and when he spies her trailing after the Knight, scowls and sends over Fletcher Dick moments later. Fletcher Dick taught Ulmer to shoot, not her; she didn’t need training, just practice. He’s starting to stoop with age, but his hands are quick and never shake, though they spot with moles and age. 

“Simon says you can get gone with the women or get up a tree,” he tells her. From the look in his eyes she knows that he already knows what her answer will.

“Maddy’s staying, ain’t she?” Wenda shrugs.

Maddy the Bitch came to them months ago; she’s older than Wenda and her dogs are her babes; big ones, too, the pride of some lord’s litter. Mastiffs. They say once she was a kennelmaster’s wife. Aye, and once Wenda was a dyer’s wife. 

No more, no more. When she came to them she was still stained blue and green up to her elbows and her knees, from jumping in and out of the vats. No more, no more. She goes all in white now. Save for the bloodstains.

“Maddy’s too mad to go,” Dick says. “You ain’t mad, least I never thought you was.” He catches her looking. “You think he’ll run away with you after this? No. That one’s made his life here, and here he’ll stay. He means to kill or be killed today.”

“Aye,” snorts Wenda. “Don’t we all?”

“You’re a girl at heart,” Dick says. “Hate to see it broken, is all.”

“And you’re a sweet old bastard,” she kisses him on his grizzled cheek, and takes his hand in hers as if they were alighting to their carriage. “Pick out my tree for me, Dicky.”

She climbs the tree he selects for her, a slender birch. Her pale clothing blends in well amidst the white bark and tremulous leaves. Wenda slings herself along a branch, locking her legs just so; she doesn’t want them to lock up and go stiff, in case she has to quickly scramble down and run for it, but she doesn’t want to topple out either. 

She’s seen Ulmer fall from a tree; he broke his elbow once doing that, and he’s damn lucky it didn’t heal wrong and stiff and swollen.

The Brotherhood have never stood and fought in a neat row like soldiers before, and they’ve no intention to do so now. They fan out, leaving the camp as it is, disappearing behind wagons, crates, into tents and barrels and under logs. The Swann girl and her septa are still in the middle at their post, enticing bait. 

Wenda looks for the Knight, and sees him down low in the brush, his mottled armor blending in perfectly amongst the brambles. One is scratching at his unprotected face; blood pebbles his hollow cheek. Red Will swears he don’t feel pain like ordinary men, but he does, only instead of cursing or raging as most men do, he laughs instead. 

She burned herself over one of their cookfires once, reaching for a leg of rabbit, and he laughed while she crammed her fingers into her mouth to suckle the pain away. His eyes didn’t laugh, though. His eyes almost never do.

Maddy’s bitches are growling and whining at their leads. She sings to them as she soothes them, and one licks anxiously at her filthy face. Looking down at them all, so small, Wenda feels a stab of fondness. These are her folk. These have been her folk. They will always be her folk, for it’s them who gave her a name. After Robin died, she had no name. She wasn’t no one’s wife no more, and she wasn’t no one’s daughter, never has been, really. 

“White Fawn,” Simon Toyne dubbed her, the way a lord might a knight, only she didn’t have to kneel to him, and he didn’t put his sword on her shoulder, only took her hand in his, like a man would shake another man’s hand. That felt good. That felt right. That felt like justice. Not the shit they spew about men in gleaming white armor and ivory cloaks, come to chase all your troubles away. Come to do as his lord commands, or as he wills, and call it duty and honor. 

Fuck their duty. And fuck their honors. Nine out of ten of them were born in castle bedchambers and nursed from noble mothers. They pretend any boy plucked out of the mud could join their ranks, but that’s a lie. Those boys are battle fodder. The sons of brewers and millers and dyers and carters. 

Those boys have no songs sung of them, and they don’t fuck princesses and guard kings. And when they lead charges, with scythes from the field in hand, they die on the end of spears, because they’ve no proper armor and no coin to buy any. And they don’t get marble tombs, they get dumped in the rivers and washed out to see. 

Distant shouts, growing louder. Hoofbeats. They’re on them now. Wenda rests her chin against the cool bark of the branch for a moment longer, closes her eyes, breaths in the sweet smells of spring, then straightens fluidly, drawing an arrow and nocking it. The camp is quiet for an instant, wind rustling the tents, and then Maddy’s dogs begin to howl, and the first goldcloaks burst through the trees, and the knights on horseback among them. 

Wenda watches as one of the first men through catches an axe in the stomach from Davos of Duskendale, and another is bludged from the first swing of Gil Whitehands’ mace. Laughter bubbles up in her throat. Giddy to watch them scurry about like rats in a maze. 

She waits and waits, seizing with muffled chuckles, then releases her first arrow, catching a man in the shoulder; he crumples with a shout, and Maddy’s black dog tears into him, spraying blood across her mistress’ boots as she descends with her morningstar. 

“And how she smiled and how she laughed, the maiden of the tree,” Wenda murmurs to herself, reaching for another arrow.

For a little while she is happy enough, firing off arrows as the Brotherhood pours out of their hiding places, but quick enough they start to drop. There’s more of them then there are goldcloaks and Kingsguard, but the goldcloaks and Kingsguard are better armed and quickly move to cut off any possible escape routes into the wood or down the stream. Wenda can pick off as many of their men as she pleases, another always rises up to take his place.

Big Belly Ben dies first, when a spear from a goldcloak spills his guts out, his belly not quite so big as he slumps to the grassy floor, warhammer tumbling from his slackened grip. 

The men around him falter then, and Wenda watches as they’re picked off with ease.

Then one of Maddy’s dogs is killed by a slash of one whitecloaks’s sword, and the next trampled under another’s dappled stallion. Wenda can’t bear to watch the third finish dying, two crossbow bolts in him, so she averts her eyes and lets an arrow fly at the visor slit of another knight. It pings off his helm instead, and she realizes he’s seen her then- a sword points at her perch. 

But she’s safer up here then on the ground, so here she stays, working through her arrows. She kills or badly wounds at least six men, by her count, but none of them knights, just common goldcloaks. And when Toyne is locked into battle with the old man, his beard glowing white as snow in the sunlight, while some scarlet cloaked squire cuts down Red Will, Midge Miller, and then charges after Oswyn, she knows they’re lost. They all know they’re lost. It’s too much; they don’t stand a chance of retreating all together, of melting back into the forest, and they can’t hold this ground, either.

A sharp bird cry distracts her, as she fumbles for an arrow; her quiver has dwindled down to just four left. From his tree, Fletcher Dick signals her to climb down and run for it. They’ve had this exchange many times before, and she’s always, more or less, done as he’s bid. But now she knows he just means for her to save her skin. 

She could run. To what? The nearest village, to be captured and sold out to the King’s justice? They’ll have her writhing and burning on a stake before dusk; they say Aerys mislikes the noose now, and prefers the roasting spit, where he can watch them wriggle while he wriggles his cock beneath his royal trousers. No, she’d rather bleed then hang or burn. They say the bleeding is fast, then very slow, and you go easy-like, once things start to turn fuzzy.

“Not the women!” someone is shouting; Maddy is down on the ground, snapping and biting at the speartip that holds her there. The one shouting must be Dayne; he’s got the biggest sword by far, that glows unnatural milky white in the light of day, though now that milk is streaked through with blood, like it came from a sickly cow. 

Does he mean to offer Maddy the choice of taking the veil, pack her off to the Silent Sisters? 

Wenda wants to howl with laughter at the thought. Maddy take the veil? Aye, and the Knight for High Septon, and Wenda can play the Maiden Fair during her holy day and fuck him silly on the crystal altar. 

Maddy decides the matter for Ser Starfall when she wriggles out from under the hesitating spearpoint, then throws herself at her attacker’s legs, knocking him to the ground and tearing a hunk from his throat with her teeth. The next man doesn’t hesitate; his spear bursts through her chest and clean into his fellow goldcloak’s. 

Dayne starts towards them, shouting, but then the Knight is on him, and Wenda feels a thrill, because for an instant she thinks one blow will be all it takes, that Dayne will never even see it coming. They say women weep when he rides by, he’s so beautiful, they say he can convince the King of anything, with words like honeyed milk, that’s why the villagers have turned on them. She wonders if they’ll weep when they carry him back to the city in a litter, his brains leaking milkily out of his head. 

But he turns in time to block the blow, and then they are off to the fucking races, as Gil Whitehands would say. Only he’s dead too, facedown across a tree stump, a puddle of red around him and a bootprint on his back. 

Simon Toyne is fighting the old bastard, Selmy, like a madman. But the Knight is a madman, and madmen don’t fight like madmen, you see, or they wouldn’t last very long. The Knight fights cravenly, lazily, men like Dayne would say, always just out of reach, pretending at tiredness or injury just to lunge forward or dart away. He’d kill a man with a sword or without it. He’d kill a man by stabbing him in the back or gouging his eyes out or wrapping a cord around his throat and dragging him across the grass. 

Men like Dayne say there’s no honest sporting in that, that a warrior should have honor, that a warrior always takes a stand and treats his foe with dignity. But men like Dayne were raised to play games that only they and their kin and their precious pure noble blood are meant to win. Where is the dignity in that? Their dice are loaded from the start. 

They get trials of their peers where the judges are already bought. Her Robin got a fortnight in a dark cell, and then, when they dragged him out, crawling with lice, gaunt and feverish from hunger, while she was calling out to him, sick with relief, they threw him down and chopped off his hand. 

Men like Selmy and Dayne would call that fair. A poacher loses a hand or his life. Nevermind all he poached were a half-starved fawn, the best he could get to feed his hungry wife and babe. 

On the wagon ride home, his head lolled in her lap and the look in his eyes was not human, with his wrapped stump tucked up under his chin. It was an animal staring up at her, behind a mask of hair and skin, and she felt half an animal looking down at him, her tears landing on his sweaty face like raindrops. “Don’t go,” she begged him. “Don’t leave me alone, Robbie.”

He was already gone, course. Already long gone. That rope he found in the barn to hang himself with, three days later, that was just his body catching up with his mind. 

Shouts of triumph go up as something crashes to the ground. Fletcher Dick’s lost his perch, his eyes staring sightless up at the sky, one of their arrows embedded in his frail old chest. 

Wenda nocks another arrow, but they see her now, and are swarming towards her birch tree. She gets one man in the hand; he falls to his knees, dropping his sword with a scream. Another in the knee; he trips into his comrade, sending them both toppled over. Now she only has two left. She scrambles down from her branch and all but slides down the trunk, then presses her back flat against it. 

“She spun away and said to him,” Wenda whispers to herself, wetting her lips, the way some men whisper prayers to gods she’s never half-believed in, “no featherbed for me.”

Her third arrow punches into a shield and stays there. Her fourth sails past the shield and gets its bearer in the cheek, skimming off flesh the way a farmer might skim his milk. He staggers back, cursing. She tosses her bow aside; she won’t be needing that again anytime soon, and draws her dirk, running for him, screaming. 

She gets in three frantic stabs that send them both to the ground, before someone else rips her off him. Her dirk slashes at their face, biting into their fat nose. Then she’s back on the ground, on her back, and men are shouting, and someone is saying, “Just get the fucking knife-,” and she slams it into the meat of their thigh, tries to wrench it back out, and finds it is there to stay. 

She tries to crawl away, but something hits her in the back once, then twice, and then the voices fade away, and her vision blurs. 

She feels sleepy so she lays her head down on the moss, and smiles blearily at Oswyn’s corpse. Someone trips over as they run away. 

When her vision comes back a little, the pain in her back is something awful, and things are quieter. 

There’s a golden leaf plastered to her bloody palm. Wenda looks at it curiously, and giggles to herself. That hurts too. She tries to lift her head, but all she can see is her Knight fetching a fresh sword from the squire in scarlet, who looks on with infatuation as Dayne tilts his helm to the Knight, then raises Dawn once more. 

Wenda tries to spit, but can’t get it past her lips. She coughs a long rattle instead, and lets her eyelids flutter closed. 

In this dream, it’s the youth of autumn when she came to them, before the winter, before this false spring. She and the Knight are keeping watch together, not fucking like Davos of Duskendale swears they must be. The fire crackles before them, and the slow rasp of his whetstone is a comfort to her. It reminds her of Robin cleaning the tongs they’d use to dye the clothes with. 

“Sing us a song, then,” he says. “That’s what the warrior maids are always doing in the stories.”

“My singing’s shit.” She takes another swing of sour Dornish wine, what they stole off some merchant up from the Marches. “Sometimes the fair knights sing too. Come on, Ser, give us a tune.”

He hums a little, but it’s a twisted take on what it should be. “No,” he says. “I’d rather make my own song.”

“And how does yours go?” she goads. She is still half afraid of him, but in the firelight and with the wine on her tongue, it’s easy to forget. 

He smiles slow and crooked in the shadows, and sings so soft and coy, “No man's gold was from them, nor any maiden's hand. Oh, the brothers of the Kingswood, that fearsome outlaw band.” 

But that’s not his song. That was written in some pot shop by some highborn bard they let go after Wenda stamped her brand on his arse. He screamed as sweetly as he sang. 

“Not very fearsome, is it?” she says, as a log splits in the fire. “Makes us sound like we’re off for a country lark, playing pretend.”

“Aren’t we?” he doesn’t look up from his blade.

“I’m not,” she says, defiantly. “I never will. I am what I say I am.”

The crooked grin is back; he doesn’t believe her. He believes in no one and nothing. He believes he is the living truth that all his knightly brothers so despise. A hollow suit with nothing but blood and madness under its rusty plate. “What are you, Wenda?”

She wakes again, feels the grass is in her hair, or is her hair in the grass? She feels cold, now, thought the day is still young. “I’ll wear a gown of golden leaves,” she mouths into the blurring light.

The Dayne casts a long shadow over her. “Get a maester,” he’s telling another man. “See what can be done for her.”

Wenda bares her crooked, yellowed teeth at him, tries to hiss. 

“No,” someone else says. “She’s on her way out. Look at all that blood. They got her good in the back.”

“Give her the gift of mercy,” says another

Fuck your mercy, Wenda thinks. I’ll bind my hair with grass. 

She wants it no more than their justice. With a muffled moan, she rolls over and tries to crawl again, but doesn’t get very far.

“Look,” a boy says, sounding awed, as though he’s stumbled into a story. “Look, she’s crawling to him.”

“She’s half blind with pain and death,” a man snaps. “She don’t know what she’s crawling to.”

“Enough,” Dayne says. He stoops beside her and picks her up as easily as one might a little child. Wenda still has strength enough to smash her temple against his chin, and he grunts in pain but does not drop or shake her. 

“You’re a brave girl,” he says, when he sets her down again. “I cannot speak for your soul, but I hope this is some peace for you, to be with him.”

In death, her Knight’s gaunt face is slack and smooth for the first time. His eyes are half open, like curled up beetles. She is close enough to kiss him. Instead she tucks her aching head against his neck, which was nearly hacked off by Dawn’s blow. Dayne’s mailed hand rests gentle on her arm for a moment, and then he backs away. 

He doesn’t matter. 

Wenda sniffs. Her back doesn’t hurt so much anymore. She doesn’t know what hell she’s going to, but she expects it’ll be a jolly one, she’ll have friends a-plenty there, and the Knight will have a high seat and a pitchfork all his own. She strokes the web of gore under his chin. 

“But you can be my forest love,” she murmurs. How he’d hate it. She closes her eyes. “And me your forest lass.” 

She’s so tired now, she feels like she could yawn. She opens her mouth again, and gasps as the cold settles in, and the darkness with it.

**Author's Note:**

> Initially this was a more straightforward linear tale of how and why Wenda joined a band of outlaws, but I ended up scrapping that and going for a more fast-paced character study focused on the very end of her life. There's not really much to say about it, besides me apologizing for the cringey woods sex, but Wenda was not the type of narrator to filter that stuff out. 
> 
> The Smiling Knight is often portrayed as Westeros' version of DC's the Joker, but I wanted to do something a little more subdued insofar as how he's depicted through Wenda's eyes. I wanted to contrast him in every way with Arthur Dayne and part of that is, unlike Dayne, him not really having this strong ethos or guiding principle or even this all consuming grudge that drives him. He's just derisive of the entire system of chivalry, while mockingly referring to himself as a knight. 
> 
> As for Wenda, I wouldn't say she is a sadist or unhinged (though she clearly has developed a taste for violence and has a very dark sense of humor), but that she is someone who is so utterly disgusted with what passes for justice that she sees no point in participating in that system anymore, either. Unlike Toyne, she has no particular grudge with the Targaryens, but she does have a hatred of the nobility and of knights after the imprisonment and maiming of her husband for poaching... surprise surprise... a single white fawn from a lord's woods. This ended with his suicide because he could not bear the intense social shame and stigma of that punishment. 
> 
> A bunch of other minor people named in this were just made up by me. Some of them are references to characters from Robin Hood (like Wenda's late husband, Robin).


End file.
